Pastor Mohn said a really cool thing at Bread of Life Fellowship this morning. He read from 1 Corinthians 14:26 (which is sort of a theme verse for the Sunday morning get-together, I guess). It goes like this:

When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation. Let ALL THINGS be done for edification. (Yeah, that's my emphasis)
If anyone speaks in a tongue, it should be by two or at the most three, and each in turn, and let one interpret; but if there is no interpreter, let him keep silent in the church; and let him speak to himself and to God.
And let two or three prophets speak, and let the others pass judgment. (Here, from what I understand, "the others" are supposed to be the others who prophesy).
But if a revelation is made to another who is seated, let the first keep silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all may be exhorted; and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets; for God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.

Pastor Mohn leaving his post as pastor of Bread of Life, and he's preparing the congregation for how they should behave without him as the visible head of the organization. They've been having "open mic" format at their morning meetings for a few weeks. And the picture that I get from that passage, and that Tom wants the people at BOL to emulate, is one of concern for the other, humility, and the desire to know and speak the truth (what the passage calls "edification") during their meeting times. It's a situation where a person's desire to speak truth takes a back seat to the good of the whole.

He said, "None of us are going to get it exactly right. No one is going to communicate absolutely perfectly what they wanted to say." I'll take it a step further. Even if one of us COULD communicate perfectly, we can't know God's truth perfectly. So even if we said what we wanted to say to the last "T", we'd get it wrong. That's why it's so necessary for us to have Christ in the middle of our relationships. His wife said it well when she said, "We need Christ between us, the way cement holds together a brick wall. It's keeping the bricks from being in direct contact, but it's also the only thing holding them together." If we demand direct contact with each other, we cannot have what 1 Cor. 14 describes. Instead, it would be chaos, because our selfish desires to judge would push us away from each other. The minute someone says something that offends me, I leave (and, when you're dealing with the truth of Christ, someone's going to get offended, because Christ himself couldn't avoid that; rest assured, neither will you).

So someone says something that we think is wrong, or that offends us, and we do the most arrogant, selfish thing we could do. We leave. We'd rather sin that risk having a confrontation. So Pastor Mohn encouraged the people of BOL to have their conflicts out, but have them out with Christ standing in between. That's relationship. When you have a problem, you take it to the person and you fix it, or you get past it, but you don't bury it until your next coffee break and bring it up with someone else.

Something tells me that the profundity of this extends beyond getting a congregation to get along with each other. If the church at large had followed this advice, there would not be the denominational rifts there are today. The way we as humans like to see things, we have two choices: We either arrogantly start our own congregation because of differences, or we arrogantly tighten our grip of authority in order to "keep people in line." Neither is of Christ.

The love and truth of Christ will be expressed in a multitude of ways... ways that we can never comprehend ourselves. He's that big. Our response to that should be one of humility and desire to maintain relationship. If you have a problem with another's expression, go and talk to them, and BOTH parties are edified. Leave, and neither benefits. Seek to control, and you become something other than what Christ wants us to be: brothers and sisters with one father in Christ. Our desire to go around Christ and have direct contact with our brothers and sisters causes breakdowns in how we should relate to each other, and it's had a disasterous effect on the body of Christ.
posted by Stephen at 11:08 PM | |